Taiwanese Edamame Farmers Revive an Export Crop

Like a groundhog, Hou Chau-Pai buries his hands into the soil to make sure each of his edamame seeds are properly deep and spaced right after being sown by machine. The latest in a Taiwanese family that’s grown the pod-bearing produce for decades, he takes process to heart. “This is no secret, but many people skip this step. Get the groundhog job done well, you’ll be halfway through to success,” grins the 38-year-old farmer in Qishan, Kaohsiung, where edamame (meaning “branched bean” in Japanese) has replaced bananas as the island’s latest cash cow, or “green gold” crop.

Buried too deep, Hou explains, edamame seeds won’t emerge or grow well. Too shallow, they get sun-dried to death. Too much space, the plant’s population can’t be maximized within a 70-day maturation period. All this paves the way for a 10%-to-20% price premium.

Currently Hou manages a total of 250 hectares of edamame farmland, mainly in southern Taiwan, while acquiring production from contract farmers elsewhere.

His annual production reaches 6,000 metric tons, snatching $3.4 million in yearly revenue. “The quality of my production has been consistent and thus highly competitive although I am not the biggest producer,” Hou boasts.

It is a legacy he carries on from his father, an agricultural middleman until his death in a plane crash en route to Nagoya in 1994. The young son took up Dad’s occupation but suffered through lean times. He then tried his own luck growing on the mainland but found conditions wanting. Hou was ready to leave the soil until a trade trip to France in 2003 introduced him to precision farming using the latest hardware. He was intrigued enough to make another go.

Today Hou and his septuagenarian uncle have a total of 700 hectares of farmland. (A cousin of Hou’s manages his uncle’s farm.) The clan is considered frontrunners among younger-generation growers who have sought economies of scale in the area’s 2,500-hectare special export zone for edamame since 2001.

The zone accounts for 70% of the island’s annual harvest, which is then processed with a markup price to generate $72 million in edamame exports today. Truckloads arrive at food-processing plants, where the best bunches are selected, boiled in salted water and fast-frozen to below -20 degrees Celsius, all in four hours to lock in its freshness before bags are shipped off to the primary target: Japan.

Over five years Taiwan has regained its No. 1 spot and secured an above-40% share in Japan’s imported edamame market, higher than the 25%-level share maintained by China and Thailand.

In 2012 Taiwan exported 34,500 metric tons of edamame–the highest in 19 yearsmostly to Japan, and 2013 looks comparable. In an economy that has lost other once bountiful crops such as bananas, that’s a distinction.

“Taiwan’s green-gold miracle today is a concerted effort between growers, the trade and the government,” says Liu Kuei-ping, chairman of Qishan’s Young Sun Frozen Food. The island’s largest frozen edamame exporter, it ships 7,000 metric tons of frozen edamame to Japan each year.

After four decades in the trade Liu can remember days when Taiwan edamame, from 5,000 producers, had 90% of the Japan market. Yet rising labor costs and tighter land supply triggered the labor-intensive industry’s exodus to neighboring China in the ’90s. A similar fate would later befall much of the island’s manufacturing sector.

With Taiwanese investment and mainland labor rates, China’s “hairy bean” exports to Japan overtook island producers like the Hous for almost a decade between 1996 and 2006 when 2001 took the worst hit.

“I was then told Taiwan’s edamame industry wouldn’t last more than five years,” says Chou Kuo-Lung, head of the agronomy lab at the Kaohsiung District Agricultural Research & Extension Station.

But Chou and other sector leaders refused to give in. Their inspection trip in 2001 to producers in coastal China, many of whom were relatives, derived the formula for a comeback: scale, mechanization, stricter pesticide management and new homegrown varieties.

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